Among many things such as groceries, telemedicine, and online education that have emerged winners in Covid times, the usage of the good old personal computer has also sort of made a comeback in lives of most of the people who are forced to stay in. Under lockdown, in most of the countries, when people have little to do with mobile-friendly services such as Uber, Airbnb, or WeWork etc., they have more time to spend on bigger screens, keyboard and mouse for a better experience and more convenient text input.

“Customers are using Windows PCs to stay productive, connect and learn in this time. In fact, over 4 trillion minutes are being spent on Windows 10 a month, a 75% increase year on year,” Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, Microsoft said in a company blog post last week. Microsoft had 86.92 per cent operating system market share in the desktop/laptop category in April, as per data sourced from Net Marketshare. The company, in March this year, had announced that it had reached 1 billion monthly active Windows 10 devices.

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The world’s second top operating system Apple’s Mac OS, which had 9.75 per cent share in April, also saw growth in the quarter ended March 28. Its Mac active installed base along with iPad “reached a new all-time high” said Luca Maestri,  Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Apple in Q2 2020 earnings call. “We believe that iPad and Mac are going to improve on a year-over-year basis during this quarter. And that’s customers that are either taking online education or working remotely,” CEO Tim Cook said.

On the other hand, the global smartphone market has declined its fastest ever – 13 per cent year-on-year in Q1 2020, research from Counterpoint said in a statement earlier this month. The market has declined below 300 million units in a quarter for the first time since Q1 2014. “The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the signs of any recovery that the market started showing in Q4 2019,” it said.